The Great Gardner
by Bye11
Summary: "The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). A post-finale, very angsty portrait of Will Gardner.


**A/N: If you're prone to crying I suggest you have a Kleenex close by. Do you remember "Ad Se Ipsum"? It's the same brand of angst. Once again, this is a Will Gardner portrait after the season finale, this time based on the parallel between him and Jay Gatsby. It is quote-heavy. I hope that all of you who have read Fitzgerald's book or watched the movie will share in my thinking that these two are not that much different. As always enjoy and if you feel like it review! **

"_The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end_."

Will Gardner, of Baltimore, Maryland had spent his entire life constructing the Will Gardner he would present to the world. It hadn't been difficult to visualize it, as a child.

He would become a baseball player, women, money, cars, clubs and sports would constitute his all life. Men would envy him, women would flock to him attracted to its star-like light.

Then he had grown up, sadly come to terms with the reality that he didn't have enough talent to make sports his career but his larger-than-life image hadn't changed that dramatically. He had substituted soiled and sweaty shirts with sleek, perfectly-tailored suits and clubs with bars but a lawyer, in Will Gardner's still-adolescent eye was nothing more than a differently-dressed player.

* * *

_"Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it waswhat preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."_

He at times laughed at the juvenile vision of his young-self. He hadn't considered morality one bit in the equation. He had seen himself shallower than he truly was. Impervious when he wasn't.

He had suspected throughout college and law-school whenever the crass talk about women that came from his drinking buddies made him a tad uncomfortable, when he had never been able to encapsulate Alicia in a teenage Playboy- style fantasy and it had never felt wrong.

And yet she hadn't been the one to give him the ultimate test. He had filed everything that concerned Alicia under the tag "exception", the one that confirmed that there was indeed a rule.

Instead, it had been a stack of papers on his desk. One of his first cases. Martha Wellington was her name. Opening the folder, the first thing he had been confronted with was her photo, taken by the police when she had first been found in an alley. Beaten after being raped. At that point, it wasn't about the pool they had with the other junior associates about who would be able to win more cases. It wasn't about building his reputation. It was just about Martha, about making sure that whoever did that to her paid and paid in full, also in the civil case.

Will Gardner was nothing like the chauvinistic image he had projected he would be. Will Gardner was a decent man.

* * *

"_He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey._"

At the end of the successful case, he had taken Martha to dinner to celebrate. No hidden intentions, just a plain-old celebration. She had told him something he had never forgotten.

"You think that you'll be a great lawyer because you have a great rhetoric, and because you are smarter than most. Let me tell you, you're wrong."

"Ouch, hearing that I'm not going to be a great lawyer from you, it hurts."

"Oh, Mr. Gardner, I don't believe for a second that you interpreted it that way. What will put you over the edge is your smile."

The concept had surprised him.

"Why?" he had asked.

"Because, clients need to trust you and when you actually smile, no, not that self-satisfied smirk you're giving me now, when you actually smile, people trust you. They know that you will fight to the death for them. I did. And jurors will too."

* * *

""_They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."  
I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time."_

The cab for her had arrived. In opening the door, she left him with a parting remark.

"They had told him that lawyers were all a rotten bunch. I believed that. But you are a good man, Will Gardner, and I think that despite all, you will remain a good man."

He had smiled and thrown himself into his job with a renewed faith in the world and in his role in it.

If Martha could see him now, she would probably snap at him.

He had fought for Chinese dissidents just so another company, represented by him, could hand them to torture. He had gotten off murderers, lawfully cheated people out of their money.

Such a good man!

He had never been able to live up to the picture she had painted that night. Nor had he been able to please his 14-year-old self. He had landed in the middle. Not totally rotten, not good enough.

He hadn't imagined that his smile would be corrupted too. He wondered if the world outside could see it, if his smile seemed fake the more his enthusiasm for anything waned.

That night it was also unconceivable for him to ever be able to truly smile again.

No, it wasn't possible. Not after what Alicia had done.

* * *

"_I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, 'way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?_"

Finding out about love for the first time was a bit like a child-progression in reverse. Instead of discovering that everything his parents had told him was nothing more than a fairy-tale, Alicia had showed him that every single love-line he had scoffed at was not far from the truth.

It had astonished him, how much his priorities changed when he was around Alicia. They had to study, they had to compete, they had to excel but secretly he wondered if it was wrong that he enjoyed talking to her about anything rather than actually moving, acting, doing.

Yet, he had been afraid to label love whatever they had. It would be the ultimate nail in the coffin of his past vision. Most of all, it would be dangerous. It would give another human being the power of destroying Will Gardner instead of worshipping him.

* * *

"_On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep_."

That lack of proper definition hadn't protected him at all. When he had left for a trip around Europe after graduation and she had told him about seeing Peter, the protective gear of not saying the 4-letter-word had revealed itself quite flimsy.

He hadn't suffered less because he hadn't proclaimed himself in love.

* * *

"_And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.  
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —  
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past._"

When she had called and he had offered her help in the form of a chat and of a job, he had been tempted to believe in destiny. If love was real, why not fate?

It had been easy for him to realize that nothing of what he had felt at Georgetown had been tarnished. On the contrary, he had come to comprehend that their friendship worked precisely because of that. It never occurred to him to treat Alicia as the frigid, humiliated, good wife. She was still to him Alicia Cavanaugh, the one woman capable of flirting shamelessly while studying Constitutional Law without ever losing her train of thought. She had probably craved to find herself again, to be appreciated, praised, treated like a human being and not a circus act.

He had remembered being the fool in love and for once didn't have to play a part.

He had lost the count of the times she had subtly rejected him during the 4 years.

He had tried being angry with her. He had flexed his feral muscles to feel the fury inside him. Why would she not give him a chance? Wasn't it plain to her, and to the world for that matter, that Will Gardner would be a much better for Alicia Florrick that her husband ever could? Why did she hesitate every single time she was on the verge of making the right choice?

He never could maintain those feelings. Being in love with her meant that forgiveness was a given. That she could take and take however much she needed to make her decision, to come back to him, to put the appropriate conclusion to what they had begun at Georgetown.

Hope at the possibility of something with her had swayed his decision, kept him above-board. It didn't matter if this or that relationship failed. Alicia was still working in her office, not far from him. The next night they spent working together could be the night in which fortune would finally favor him. His something more-than-work was in the words he was sure she had in her mind, but was terrified to say.

He would wait, for her to realize that she could gain much, that he would do anything never to hurt her, to disrespect her. She had to see, it was just a question of time.

When he had felt she was ready to take the last step, that a little nudge would suffice to finally put her in the right direction, he had blurted the words

"This night is over, we talk."

The hours had felt full of future. He rehearsed his speech, he would convince her that if both of them, experienced warriors couldn't fight whatever vestigial attraction they felt, it was time to give in and let the tide bring them on the course they should have always taken.

A call had interrupted his musings. Alicia. She had to be. He had taken it without even checking the caller-id.

Another female voice. Kalinda. "Cary and Alicia are forming their firm and they are taking Robin. Just thought you should know."

Then all went black.

For a few days, while assimilating the shock, he had kept his phone even closer by than usual.

Alicia would call. She would change her mind. She would explain. She would give a sense to the chain of events. He knew Alicia. Of course she would call. A call or a visit had to come.

* * *

_"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."_

After a while, he had admitted to himself the truth he had always known. Alicia wouldn't call. She wouldn't visit.

Why would she feel the necessity to explain? What wasn't clear enough?

He had misused the word hopes. They had been dreams, delusions of a man that had devoted too much effort running after a woman that would never stop for him.

What had remained of the big-board poster he had envisioned for himself long before? A lawyer that once again had to fight for his place in the professional world. A man that wept for the loss of an ideal partner and friend that had never existed outside his imagination.

Once dismissed his Alicia bias it had been easy to put together the clues that had been there all along. He had taken the scrambles she had felt acceptable to discard from her table and had put them together to form an elaborate construction of an epic love story.

Instead, it was the already-seen script of way too many lawyer moves. Let the opponent believe that there is an opportunity, let him drop his guard and then strike.

He had been used. As the cardboard man to boost her confidence, as the nurse to heal her wounds, as the friend who would support her.

He had been used.

* * *

"_They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made._"

In all the years he had known her, he had described her with plenty of adjectives. He had recovered some of his SAT words just for her. Never the adjective careless.

Careless was the perfect adjective. Not as a lawyer, of course. Not as a mother, he would never dare. Not as a wife, he had all the proof in front of him.

With him, she had been utterly and completely careless. As in she had played with his feelings as if they had no consequence, as a child that during the wind doesn't mind her ribbons or her hat.

With him, she had been utterly and completely careless. As in she hadn't cared. Her regard for him hadn't warranted a call, a visit, an apology. Nothing. Determinate, cruel, careless Alicia.

She could go, back to Peter, back to the Governor that would surely take all the time in the world to make her feel appreciated. Back to the children that would grow and leave her in the loneliness of white-tie events. Back to a life without him, without his friendship, his love.

She hadn't cared for everything he had deposed at her feet.

Will Gardner had become Great, withstanding gambling addictions, bankruptcies, suspensions, politics, his own at-times immoral behavior, even backstabbings.

The Great Gardner had been brought down by her not caring.

**A/N: For the loyal readers among you, I hope I'm not repeating myself too much with these one-shots. To me, it seems that Will is such a multi-faceted character that his story can be told in a myriad of ways but if you don't agree, I'm sorry for boring you! **


End file.
